Today, Microsoft has pushed a new update out to all Xbox Series X/S machines, and it’s something that frequent users of the machine have been asking for since 2020: the option to disable Quick Resume for some specific games.
Quick Resume is a great feature… when it works. Simply put, it allows you to boot your machine and dive right back into the vast majority of games on the Xbox platform, even if the console has been turned off. Whilst this is incredibly convenient for the most part, there are some circumstances where Quick Resume doesn’t quite work as intended (mostly in online-focused games, let’s be honest), forcing users to either restart or force-quit games to actually get back online or into a lobby. In one instance, I even noticed that my in-game timer had accrued a ridiculous 200+ hours of game time whilst it was left suspended in Quick Resume and I was busy elsewhere on the console. Oops!
As of today, everyone can access a toggle for a selection of games on the Series X/S that will let you disable Quick Resume on a game-by-game basis. The feature, which began rolling out to members of the Xbox Insider beta programme last week, can be found by opening the More Options menu on a game tile, selecting Manage Quick Resume, heading to the next page and selecting Disable Quick Resume.
I’ve already tried this with titles like Battlefield 6, Arc Raiders, and Call of Duty and it works as advertised, making sure the game closes fully when you leave it or suspend your machine, and booting from the menu when you go back to play. It’s only a small thing, but not having to navigate multiple menus when revisiting a game that was automatically suspended is a great quality-of-life improvement, and one I’m surprised took so long to incorporate into the Xbox user experience.
I’m generally quite a big fan of Quick Resume: it’s been great for certain offline or single-player titles (Vampire Crawlers is a good example of it working well, as far as current games go). It was also handy for palette-cleansing in between marathon sessions of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 when I was sick last year – swapping over to Netflix for a ‘pad break’ and jumping straight back into the action is a great experience, and quietly shows off one of the best use cases for that nifty little SSD at the core of the modern console experience. Now that we have an option to toggle Quick Resume off when it doesn’t quite live up to its promises, I think I’m going to appreciate it even more.
